23 Art Exhibitions to View in N.Y.C. This Weekend

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A. Paul Weber’s illustration for “Hitler: A German Doom,” one of nearly 150 works from Germany and Austria in the 1930s, on view at the Neue Galerie until May 28.Credit2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

May 17, 2018

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

‘TARSILA DO AMARAL: INVENTING MODERN ART IN BRAZIL’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 3). The subtitle is no overstatement: In the early 1920s, first in Paris and then back home in São Paulo, Brazil, this painter really did lay the groundwork for the coming of modernism in Latin America’s most populous nation. Tired of the European pretenders in Brazil’s art academies, Tarsila (who was always called by her first name) began to intermingle Western, African and indigenous motifs into flowing, biomorphic paintings, and to theorize a new national culture fueled by the principle of antropofagia, or “cannibalism.” Along with spare, assured drawings of Rio and the Brazilian countryside, this belated but very welcome show assembles Tarsila’s three most important paintings, including the classic “Abaporu” (1928): a semi-human nude with a spindly nose and a comically swollen foot. (Jason Farago)212-708-9400, moma.org

‘HUMA BHABHA: WE COME IN PEACE’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 28). This spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission includes two figures: one that is somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious mask-face and that visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline behind it, and another bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny, black drapery. The title is a variant on the line an alien uttered to an anxious crowd in the 1951 science-fiction movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. The installation also feels like an extension of the complex, cross-cultural conversation going on downstairs, inside a museum packed with 5,000 years of art history. (Martha Schwendener)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘THE FACE OF DYNASTY: ROYAL CRESTS FROM WESTERN CAMEROON’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 3). In the African wing, a show of just four commanding wooden crowns constitutes a blockbuster in its own right. These massive wooden crests — in the form of stylized human faces with vast vertical brows — served as markers of royal power among the Bamileke peoples of the Cameroonian grasslands, and the Met’s recent acquisition of an 18th-century specimen is joined here by three later examples, each featuring sharply protruding cheeks, broadly smiling mouths and brows incised with involute geometric patterns. Ritual objects like these were decisive for the development of Western modernist painting, and a Cameroonian crest was even shown at MoMA in the 1930s, as a “sculpture” divorced from ethnography. But these crests had legal and diplomatic significance as well as aesthetic appeal, and their anonymous African creators had a political understanding of art not so far from our own. (Farago)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (through Oct. 8). Let us pray. After last year’s stark exhibition of Rei Kawakubo’s irregular apparel, the Met Costume Institute is back in blockbuster mode with this three-part blowout on the influence of Catholicism on haute couture of the last century. The trinity of fashion begins downstairs at the Met with the exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican; upstairs are gowns fit for angels in heaven (by Lanvin, Thierry Mugler, Rodarte) or angels fallen to earth (such as slinky Versace sheaths garlanded with crosses). The scenography at the Met is willfully operatic — spotlights, choir music — which militates against serious thinking about fashion and religion, but up at the Cloisters, by far the strongest third of the show, you can commune more peacefully with an immaculate Balenciaga wedding gown or a divine Valentino gown embroidered with Cranac’s Adam and Eve. (Farago)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION’ at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America’s great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program “Sam and Friends” before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft-faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother’s old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace-and-love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago)718-784-0077, movingimage.us

‘THE INCOMPLETE ARAKI’ at the Museum of Sex (through Aug. 31). It remains a bit of a tourist trap, but the for-profit Museum of Sex is making its most serious bid yet for artistic credibility with a two-floor exhibition of Japan’s most prominent and controversial photographer. Nobuyoshi Araki has spent decades shooting Tokyo streetscapes, blossoming flowers and, notably, women trussed up in the baroque rope bondage technique known as kinbaku-bi, or “the beauty of tight binding.” Given the venue, it’s natural that this show concentrates on the erotic side of his art, but less lustful visitors can discover an ambitious cross section of Mr. Araki’s omnivorous photography, including his lastingly moving “Sentimental Journey,” picturing his beloved wife, Yoko, from honeymoon to funeral. (Farago)212-689-6337, museumofsex.com

‘ZOE LEONARD: SURVEY’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). Some shows cast a spell. Zoe Leonard’s reverberant retrospective does. Physically ultra-austere, all white walls with a fiercely edited selection of objects — photographs of clouds taken from airplane windows; a mural collaged from vintage postcards; a scattering of empty fruit skins, each stitched closed with needle and thread — it’s an extended essay about travel, time passing, political passion and the ineffable daily beauty of the world. (Holland Cotter)212-570-3600, whitney.org

‘LIKE LIFE: SCULPTURE, COLOR AND THE BODY (1300 TO NOW)’ at the Met Breuer (through July 22). Taking a second run at the splashy theme-show extravaganza, the Met Breuer has greater success. This one is certainly more coherent since it centers entirely on the body and its role in art, science, religion and entertainment. It gathers together some 120 sculptures, dolls, artist’s dummies, effigies, crucifixes and automatons. Many are rarely lent and may not return anytime soon. (Roberta Smith)212-731-1675, metmuseum.org

‘THE LONG RUN’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person’s game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith)212-708-9400, moma.org

‘THE METROPOLIS IN LATIN AMERICA, 1830-1930’ at Americas Society (through June 30). Fans of Latin American architecture are overly besotted with the modernist era: Luis Barragán’s color-saturated houses in Mexico City, Oscar Niemeyer’s cutting-edge presidential palace in Brasília. But this eye-opening exhibition turns the clock back 100 years and shows how six cities — Buenos Aires; Havana; Lima, Peru; Mexico City; Rio de Janeiro; and Santiago, Chile — used architecture and urban design to express new national ambitions. Vintage photographs disclose how in Mexico’s sprawling capital its new republican government erected statues of Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, while Argentina plowed out lordly avenues in imitation of Haussmann-era Paris. All these cities had keen architectural ambitions, though if you have to pick the most sophisticated, it’s Rio in a landslide. Stare at Marc Ferrez’s jaw-dropping 1895 panoramic photograph of the erstwhile Brazilian capital, with Sugarloaf Mountain looming over Botafogo and Flamengo, and book the next flight. (Farago)212-249-8950, as-coa.org

‘MILLENNIUM: LOWER MANHATTAN IN THE 1990S’ at the Skyscraper Museum (through June 24). This plucky Battery Park institution transports us back to the years of Rudy Giuliani, Lauryn Hill and 128-kilobit modems to reveal the enduring urban legacy of a decade bookended by recession and terror. In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, landlords in the financial district rezoned their old skyscrapers for residential occupancy, and more than 20 towers were declared landmarks, including the ornate Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway and the home of Delmonico’s at 56 Beaver Street. Battery Park City flowered; yuppies priced out of TriBeCa came down to Wall Street; a new Guggenheim, designed by a fresh-from-Bilbao Frank Gehry, nearly arose by South Street Seaport. From this distance, the 1990s can seem almost like a golden age, not least given that, more than 16 years after Sept. 11, construction at the underwhelming new World Trade Center is still not finished. (Farago)skyscraper.org

‘ALBERTO SAVINIO’ at the Center for Italian Modern Art (through June 23). The paintings of this Italian polymath have long been overshadowed by the brilliant work of his older brother, Giorgio de Chirico. This show of more than 20 canvases from the late 1920s to the mid-30s may not change that, but the mix of landscapes with bright patterns and several eerie portraits based on family photographs are surprisingly of the moment. (Smith)646-370-3596, italianmodernart.org

‘SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION’ at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third-floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike — Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century-spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilletantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago)212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org

‘THE SENSES: DESIGN BEYOND VISION’ at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Oct. 28). There’s a serious, timely big idea at this exhibition: As social media, smartphones and virtual reality make us ever more “ocularcentric,” we have taken leave of our nonvisual senses — and need to get back in touch, literally. Thus “The Senses” features multisensory adventures such as a portable-speaker-size contraption that emits odors, with titles like “Surfside” and “Einstein,” in timed combinations; hand-painted scratch-and-sniff wallpaper (think Warhol’s patterned cows but with cherries — cherry-scented, naturally); and a device that projects ultrasonic waves to simulate the touch and feel of virtual objects. The show also presents commissions, videos, products and prototypes from more than 65 designers and teams, some of which address sensory disabilities like blindness and deafness, including Vibeat, which can be worn as a bracelet, brooch or necklace and translates music into vibrations. And if you bring the kids, they will likely bliss out stroking a wavy, fur-lined installation that makes music as you rub it. (Michael Kimmelman)212-849-8400, cooperhewitt.org

‘GRANT WOOD: AMERICAN GOTHIC AND OTHER FABLES’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). This well-done survey begins with the American Regionalist’s little-known efforts as an Arts and Crafts designer and touches just about every base. It includes his mural studies, book illustrations and most of his best-known paintings — including “American Gothic” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Best of all are Wood’s smooth undulant landscapes with their plowmen and spongy trees and infectious serenity. (Smith)212-570-3600, whitney.org

Last Chance

‘BEFORE THE FALL: GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN ART OF THE 1930S’ at Neue Galerie (through May 28). An exhibition in the form of a chokehold, the third of the Neue Galerie’s recent shows on art and German politics pushes into the years of dictatorship, with paintings, drawings and photographs by artists deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis — as well as by those who joined the party or who thought they could shut out the catastrophe. (You will know the dissidents, like Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka; the fascists and sellouts are less known.) Gazing at macabre still lifes of dolls and dead flowers, or dreamy landscapes in imitation of an earlier German Romanticism, you may ask to what degree artists are responsible for the times in which they work. But then you see “Self-Portrait in the Camp,” by the Jewish German painter Felix Nussbaum — made between his escape from a French internment camp and his deportation to Auschwitz — and you know that there can be no pardon. (Farago)212-628-6200, neuegalerie.org

‘DIAMOND MOUNTAINS: TRAVEL AND NOSTALGIA IN KOREAN ART’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 20). Mount Kumgang, or the “Diamond Mountain,” lies about 90 miles from Pyeongchang’s Olympic Stadium, but it’s a world away: The august, multipeaked range lies in North Korea and has been impossible to visit for most of the past seven decades. Featuring stunning loans from the National Museum of Korea and other institutions in Seoul, South Korea, this melancholy beauty of a show assembles three centuries’ worth of paintings of the Diamond Mountain range, and explores how landscapes intermingle nostalgia, nationalism, legend and regret. The unmissable prizes here are the painstaking paintings of Jeong Seon, the 18th-century artist who is perhaps the greatest of all Korean painters. And later impressions of the mountains, including a blotchy vision from the Paris-based modernist Lee Ungno, give a deeper historical weight to very live geopolitics. (Farago)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘GOLDEN KINGDOMS: LUXURY AND LEGACY IN THE ANCIENT AMERICAS’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 28). With its cheerfully crowd-seeking title, the Met’s exhibition of pre-Columbian art promises an unabashed celebration of splendor. Offering some 300 objects spanning more than 2,500 years, and representing cultures from the Moche, Wari and Inca to the Olmec, Maya and Aztec, it delivers in full. Among the standouts are an “Octopus Frontlet” (A.D. 300-600), a gold body ornament made by the Peruvian Moche; “earflares” big as bangles, the oldest of which date to 800-500 B.C.; a wonderfully vivid, graceful Mayan relief from 736 A.D. that depicts a bejeweled King Pakal I; and shockingly vibrant panels made with tens of thousands of blue and gold macaw feathers by the Wari of Peru in A.D. 600-900, their function unknown. (Nancy Princenthal)212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘PETER HUJAR: SPEED OF LIFE’ at the Morgan Library and Museum (through May 20). It’s hard to say which is more surprising: that Peter Hujar’s photographs of underground life in New York in the 1970s and ’80s have found their way to the Morgan Library and Museum, or that the classically minded institution has become unbuttoned enough to exhibit them in this heartbreaker of a show. Hujar (1934-87) lived most of his professional life in the East Village and, through studio portraits and cityscapes, captured a downtown that has since been all but erased by time, gentrification and AIDS. Although he was little known by the mainstream art world in his lifetime, this show, startlingly tender, reveals him to be one of the major American photographers of the late 20th century. (Cotter)212-685-0008, themorgan.org

‘SALLY MANN: A THOUSAND CROSSINGS’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (through May 28). All of this photographer’s strengths are on view in this deftly chosen and admirably displayed exhibition that covers most of her 40-plus-year career. The 108 images here (47 of which have never been exhibited before) provide a provocative tour through Ms. Mann’s accomplishments and serve as a record of exploration — into the past, into this country’s and photography’s history, stamped with a powerful vision. (Vicki Goldberg)202-737-4215, nga.gov

‘REBEL SPIRITS: ROBERT F. KENNEDY AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’ at the New-York Historical Society (through May 20). Featuring stark black-and-white photographs of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as faded ephemera that memorialized them, this exhibition reveals the various ways in which the lives of these two influential figures were juxtaposed. It also traces the circuitous routes that belatedly pointed Kennedy toward the more incendiary goals King set first regarding civil rights, poverty and the Vietnam War. (Sam Roberts) 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org

‘STEPHEN SHORE’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 28). Not staged, not lit, not cropped, not retouched, the color photographs of this American master are feats of dispassionate representation. This must-see retrospective — curated with real wit by Quentin Bajac, MoMA’s photo chief — opens with Mr. Shore’s teenage snaps at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Then it turns to the road-trip imagery of “American Surfaces” and the steely precision of “Uncommon Places” — landmarks in photographic history that scandalized an establishment convinced the camera could find beauty solely in black-and-white. Mr. Shore is revealed not only as a peripatetic explorer but also a restless experimenter with new photographic technologies, from stereoscopic slide shows to print-on-demand books. The only flaw is his recent embrace of Instagram, allowing museumgoers to lazily flick through images on MoMA’s smudged iPads. New technologies are great, but not at the expense of concentration. (Farago)212-708-9400, moma.org

‘2018 TRIENNIAL: SONGS FOR SABOTAGE’ at the New Museum (through May 27). This Bowery museum’s fourth triennial exhibition, “Songs for Sabotage,” is the smallest, tightest edition of the show so far. Immaculately installed, it’s also the best looking. There’s a lot of good work, which is global in scope and not by a list of prevetted up-and-comers. (Zhenya Machneva, Dalton Paula and Daniela Ortiz are artists to look for.) Less admirably, it’s a safe and unchallenging show. Despite a politically demanding time, it acts as if ambiguity and discretion were automatically virtues. In an era when the market rules, it puts its money on the kind of art — easily tradable, displayable, palette-tickling objects — that art fairs suck up. (Cotter)212-219-1222, newmuseum.org